Wednesday, October 22, 2014

There is more to Schiele than pornography you can hang on your walls

Although some of his models keep their
clothes on and he also painted landscapes, artist Egon Schiele is best known
for his nudes many of which are explicit. This aspect of his work underpins TheRadical Nude a new exhibition of his work at London’s Courtauld Gallery. In their publicity for the show they state “Schiele’s
technical virtuosity, highly original vision and unflinching depictions of the
naked figure distinguish these works as being among his most significant
contributions to the development of modern art.”

The Guardian’s art critic Jonathon
Jones goes further stating that the Austro-Hungarian artist is “a
feminist artist ahead of his time”.
A claim he justifies by saying “his delight in the vagina sets him apart
as an artist who not only lusts after but genuinely adores women.” Jones expounds
on this theory citing the misogyny explicit
in Schiele’s contemporaries, from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon on. You can read the full review here.

On the other side of the
Atlantic in New York the Neue Galerie is hosting the exhibition Egon Schiele: Portraits. Four
times the size of the Courtauld exhibition, Portraits gives a much wider look
at his oeuvre from his student days to his death 12 years later. Consisting of paintings, drawings, and sculpture the exhibition documents an evolution of the
artist's style, both pre- and post-imprisonment.

In April
of 1912 Schiele spent 24 days in jail on a charge of public immorality for
exposing minors to his erotic art in his studio. The previous year he had been
forced to leave the Czech town of Krumau for working with a nude model outdoors.
These incidents had a profound effect upon Schiele, especially the imprisonment.
Which saw him adopted a more conventional attitude to morality steering away
explicit sexuality subject matter to the more traditional.

In his critique
of the Neue Galerie exhibition New York critic Ken Johnson said “Of the approximately 125 items on view, only 11 are oil
paintings, which is a good thing. Except for a lovely, large 1915 picture of
his wife, Edith, in a vibrant striped dress, Schiele’s paintings are
overworked, dark and turgid. His drawings are nimble and nuanced. Working on
paper with pencil, charcoal, ink, gouache, watercolor and crayons, often using
different mediums to achieve diverse effects within the same picture, Schiele
was as responsive to his own impulses as he was to the human reality of his
subjects.” You can the full review here.

Any examination of Schiele’s work
confirms Johnson’s view except Johnson misses Schiele’s compositional dexterity.
His ability to dissect the picture plane with his lines and his restricted use
of color are the elements that make Schiele’s works sing.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.